Cross-border mergers and acquisitions activities (M&As) sharply increased over the last two decades, partly as a result of financial liberalization policies, government policies and regional agreements. In this paper, we identify some of the main forces driving M&As, using a unique database on...

Gravity models have been widely used to describe bilateral trade in goods. Portes and Rey [Portes, R., Rey, H., 2005. The Determinants of Cross-Border Equity Flows. Journal of International Economics, 65(2), 269–296.] applied this framework to cross-border equity flows and found that distance,...

This paper analyzes the determination of equity portfolios and country stock returns in the context of imperfectly integrated stock markets. We consider a continuous-time model of a two-country endowment economy in which the level of financial integration is captured by a proportional tax on...

We propose a simple quantitative method to linearize around the risky steady state of a small open economy. Unlike when the deterministic steady state is used, the net foreign asset position is well defined. We allow for stochastic income and stochastic interest rate.

Home bias is a perennial feature of international capital markets. We review various explanations of this puzzling phenomenon highlighting recent developments in macroeconomic modelling that incorporate international portfolio choices in standard two-country general equilibrium models. We refer...

This paper analyzes the determinants of cross-border asset trade on cross-country data and a Swedish data set. We focus our analysis on the impact of the euro for the determinants of trade in bonds, equity and banking assets. With the help of a theoretical model, we disentangle the different...

Using aggregate data on bilateral cross-border equity holdings, we investigate whether investors correctly hedge their over-exposure to domestic risk (the well-known equity home bias) by investing in foreign stock markets that have low correlation with their home stock market. To deal with the...

Prepared for the Encyclopedia of financial globalization

Two of the main puzzles in international economics are the consumption and the portfolio home biases. We solve for international equity portfolios in a two-country/two-good stochastic equilibrium model with trade costs in goods markets. We show that introducing trade costs, as suggested by...

Recent models of international equity portfolios exhibit two potential weaknesses. First, the structure of equilibrium equity portfolios is determined by the correlation of equity returns with real exchange rates and non financial income; yet empirically domestic equities don’t appear to be a...